Our Goal for this Blog

Over the years we have received and continue to receive numerous phone calls and emails asking many different farm related questions. Our thought is that we would try out a blog to keep people up to date on what we are doing here on Puterbaugh Farms and at Hops Direct.

We will just jump right into where we are at in the growing season with a very brief look at what it took to get the hops to the stage they are in now. If interest is actually shown and people are looking for more information we will continue through the winter and pick up the beginning next spring, which will allow everyone to get a feel for what a full crop year looks like from a hop grower's perspective and all of the many challenges involved. We hope you enjoy.

Monday, July 28, 2008

Don't break the mainline!!

Today I was out changing the settings on our automatic timers for the drip irrigation in one set of hop yards as per my uncle's instructions. Of course man is smarter than most machines so there was no way to make them do what we wanted them to. (we even stooped as low as reading the instructions, don't recommend doing this... waste of time) But more importantly midway through I noticed a small ravine running down one of the rows. Tomorrow's project is to fill the whole thing in, it's only a 14 mile drive in our loader and back so that's a good hour plus sitting on the loader with flashing lights (we don't have a trailer big enough to haul it). As always photos will help tell the story.

So there was a rather small trail leading down a row... I decided to follow it out of curiosity.

The hole began to open up a bit more as I continued to walk down. Since our hop yard is on a decent pitch I assumed it would only get worse.

As you can see the ravine is pretty big. Tractors no longer will fit down the row with out falling into the holes that were created. The saving grace was that it ran straight down on row instead of sideways across the field, which would have been a major mess.

This hop was not as lucky as the rest. It's a little hard to survive 90 degree heat with no soil around your roots.

Hops are tough though. These one have fallen down 3 to 4 feet to the point were the twine is holding them up. Upon closer inspection I notice that most of the rhizomes were out of the soil and only the roots were reaching into the ground.

2 comments:

Currently the strategy has been a lot of dirt and a loader, so far it has been a two day project. I believe it should be finished up sometime tomorrow. So that we can move on to doing better things with our time than filling in large unexpected holes in our hop yards.

Questions?

Please feel free to email us at hopsdirect@gmail.com if you have any questions related to this blog, if there is a topic you would like to know more about, or if there is a topic you might want us to talk about.

About Me

Puterbaugh Farms is a fourth generation family hop farm. We have been growing hops in the fertile Yakima Valley of Washington State since 1932. We reside in Mabton where we currently grow over 12 varieties of hops including the following: Bravo, Cascade, Centennial, Chinook, Cluster, Columbus, Galena, Mt. Hood, Nugget, Super Galena, Tettnanger, and Willamette. We also carry many other domestic varieties of hops and import hops from other growing regions around the world.